Skip to main content

The Mystery of Who Played Bass on The White Album’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”

George Harrison, the quiet Beatle, was the first to break out on his own in 1970 with his glorious triple album All Things Must Pass. “Garbo talks! — Harrison is free!” wrote Melody Maker’s Richard Williams in a review, a reference to the reclusive silent film star who, like the Beatles’ guitarist, kept her mystique and star power even after fans first heard her voice. Harrison’s revelation couldn’t have been as dramatic as all that.

Surely, no fan of “Taxman,” “Within You Without You,” “Here Comes the Sun,” “Something” — and especially The White Album’s stunning “While My Guitar Gently Sleeps” — doubted that George had it in him all along. But the other Beatles would only humor him during The White Album sessions. That is, until he brought Eric Clapton into the studio. “That then made everyone act better,” Harrison remembers in Anthology. “Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously.”

The question in the You Can’t Unhear This video above is whether Paul played bass on the final studio recording and, if not, who did?  It’s an integral part of the song’s feel — the gritty, restrained growl, slowly growing in intensity until it sounds like it might give Harrison’s guitar something else to weep about. The mystery of the aggressive-yet-muted part “has perplexed scholars and Beatles fans for decades.” If you’ve remained unperplexed, you might find yourself questioning assumptions about this most beloved of Beatles’ tunes.

Sessions for the song began in late July of 1968, then picked up again in August, but Harrison decided to scrap everything and start over in September once Ringo returned from a “self-imposed exile” in the Mediterranean. The band seemed refreshed: “the quality of the performances on the new September version seemed to reflect that renewed spirit.” Sessions for the track wrapped on September 24. “For many years it was believed that this was the recording session in which Eric Clapton overdubbed his lead guitar solo,” writes the Beatles Bible. Not so — Clapton sat in on all of the live takes recorded with the band. Ah, but who played bass? See the mystery take shape above and post your theories below.

Related Content:

The Beatles’ 8 Pioneering Innovations: A Video Essay Exploring How the Fab Four Changed Pop Music

Is “Rain” the Perfect Beatles Song?: A New Video Explores the Radical Innovations of the 1966 B-Side

Hear the Beautiful Isolated Vocal Harmonies from the Beatles’ “Something”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

The Mystery of Who Played Bass on The White Album’s “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/3FxcEin
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Board Game Ideology — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #108

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_108_10-7-21.mp3 As board games are becoming increasingly popular with adults, we ask: What’s the relationship between a board game’s mechanics and its narrative? Does the “message” of a board game matter? Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by game designer Tommy Maranges , educator Michelle Parrinello-Cason , and ex-philosopher Al Baker to talk about re-skinning games, designing player experiences, play styles, game complexity, and more. Some of the games we mention include Puerto Rico, Monopoly, Settlers of Catan, Sorry, Munchkin, Sushi Go, Welcome To…, Codenames, Pandemic, Occam Horror, Terra Mystica, chess, Ticket to Ride, Splendor, Photosynthesis, Spirit Island, Escape from the Dark Castle, and Wingspan. Some articles that fed our discussion included: “ The Board Games That Ask You to Reenact Colonialism ” by Luke Winkie “ Board Games Are Getting Really, Really Popular ” by Darron Cu...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Led Zeppelin Stole Their Way to Fame and Fortune

When Bob Dylan released his 2001 album  Love and Theft , he lifted the title from a  book of the same name by Eric Lott , who studied 19th century American popular music’s musical thefts and contemptuous impersonations. The ambivalence in the title was there, too: musicians of all colors routinely and lovingly stole from each other while developing the jazz and blues traditions that grew into rock and roll. When British invasion bands introduced their version of the blues, it only seemed natural that they would continue the tradition, picking up riffs, licks, and lyrics where they found them, and getting a little slippery about the origins of songs. This was, after all, the music’s history. In truth, most UK blues rockers who picked up other people’s songs changed them completely or credited their authors when it came time to make records. This may not have been tradition but it was ethical business practice. Fans of Led Zeppelin, on the other hand, now listen to their...
Post a Comment
Read more